Fossil fuel is a general term for combustible geologic deposits of organic materials formed from decayed plants and animals that have been converted to crude oil, coal, natural gas, or heavy oils by exposure to heat and pressure in the earth's crust over hundreds of millions of years.
Fossil fuels are a finite, non-renewable resource. With global modernization in the 20th and 21st centuries, the demand for energy from fossil fuels, especially gasoline derived from oil, is growing and has been the cause of major regional and global conflicts. Increased demand for energy has also increased the cost of hydrocarbon fuels. Aside from energy, many industries, including the plastics and chemical manufacturing industries, are dependent on the availability of hydrocarbons as a feedstock for manufacturing. Alternatives to current sources of supply would help mitigate the upward pressure on these raw material costs.
Lipids for use in biofuels can be produced in microorganisms, such as algae, fungi, and bacteria. Typically, manufacturing a lipid in a microorganism involves growing microorganisms, such as algae, fungi, or bacteria, which are capable of producing a desired lipid in a fermentor or bioreactor, isolating the microbial biomass, drying it, and extracting the intracellular lipids, which are a form of oil. However, these processes are generally considered to be inefficient and expensive, particularly when one considers the scale on which they must be conducted to produce meaningful supplies of fuel. One significant problem with these processes is the extraction of the lipid or oil from a microorganism.
There is a need for a process for extracting oil from microorganisms that mitigates the problems of low efficiency and high cost of current methods for lipid extraction from microorganisms. The present invention provides such a process.